Square Enix wants you to play Final Fantasy XIV for a long time, that’s a given with any online, subscription-based game. However, Square doesn’t want you playing for hours upon hours during the day; Enter the “fatigue” and “dormancy” systems.

“We wanted to introduce a system to reward players who don’t have a lot of time to play,” producer Hiromichi Tanaka told Famitsu.com during Gamescom last week. “Maybe it looks as though we are placing long playing users at a disadvantage, but the idea is really to let play for short periods be viable.”

This most likely won’t stop players who like to play longer from cutting their time back. So what about them?

“We want these players to try different classes. If you change class the fatigue doesn’t affect you, so you could try non-combat classes as well. You actually have more play choices now as you can make more characters.”

However, if early reports of just how drastic the fatigue system really is are to be believed, Square Enix may have a problem on their hands. Apparently, fatigue rises fifty percent within two hours and takes about two days to go back to zero. That means that playing for four hours would mean you’d have to stop playing for two days. Not very ideal for an MMORPG that charges a monthly fee.

If this is true and stays in place, there will definitely be some sort of uproar from players. We’ll see what happens come release.

For some people they may only get 4 hours every couple days. Some weeks are so busy for me I don’t get to even play until the weekend and that may even be short. So that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Now if you take into consideration people who play constantly, they will progress further into the game leaving others behind. I know as I played the first Final Fantasy online along with WOW and Everquest. , people can get left behind. Hopefully they have found a way to make everyone able to progress through the story and enjoy the game equally. We will have to wait and see.

zerolegacy0

You should probably double check the credibility of this Sankaku is known for misinformation. It sounds a little exaggerated.

Zero

I’m playing the beta, and I haven’t experienced anything like this. You can change jobs on one character though, and carry abilities from various jobs, for example Lancer can benefit from having some abilities learned from the Marauder class. So, in other words, they rewards players who try and diversify their skill set, regardless of what job they play as main.

From various translations of the above article, Its still very confusing as to what the fatigue system does exactly.

Translation Quote-

“There are mechanisms built into FFXIV to slow players down when playing a single class. If you play one class too much in a short period you start hitting “surplus experience”, which means you’ll be getting less EXP per kill. This is meant to make it so hardcore players won’t get too far ahead with 1 class. If you switch classes (weapons), surplus does not carry over, so you can start leveling a second class once you hit surplus EXP.”

If this is the case, it really isn’t all that bad, and I have no idea where Sankaku got the, “you’d have to stop playing for two days” thing…?

Keep in mind, the days that sankaku is referring to, could be in game days, which would make the so called wait period not all that long.